This shouldn't come as a huge surprise. Jonathan Riddell, lead developer of the Kubuntu project and the only person paid by Canonical to work on the KDE variant of the popular distribution, has announced that after the 12.04 release, Canonical will no longer be funding him, effectively putting Kubuntu on the same level as other Ubuntu variants like Xubuntu.

"The Linux Mint team has announced the availability of Linux Mint KDE 12. The version is running KDE 4.7 which is a bit older as KDE 4.8 was recently release. However, considering the close release dates it was not possible for the Linux Mint team to packages KDE 4.8. That's not a big problem as you can easily upgrade to KDE 4.8 [we will be publishing a how to soon].

Linux Mint KDE is a perfect OS for someone planning to migrate from Windows or wants to retain the old look and feel of Gnome 2 with all the modern technology. KDE is extremely polished and comes with great ease of use for newbies and all the advanced features for daredevils. KDE has maintained different versions for netbooks, desktops and touch-based devices so you won't lose functionality. You get the bottom panel where you get to pin your apps and you can also add the top panel. You can use all the 3D effects (cube desktop and so on under KDE)."

For those that like KDE, may i make a suggest you may not have heard of? Vector Linux, which has not only a KDE 4 LiveCD but a classic KDE 3 as well. Its actually pretty sharp and they have several images built based on what you need, light, full, etc.

I vote for Chakra.
It is somewhat new, but as a half-rolling variant of Arch Linux, with a heavy focus on KDE (non-Qt apps are only available via a "bundles" system), it really is a great KDE showcase.

It seems like Canonical doesn't want Ubuntu to remain a GNOME distribution, either. They seem to want the whole GNOME/KDE thing to just go away. They want GTK+ and Qt applications running together seamlessly, they want to support freedesktop.org standards, and they want their own branded user experience with the Unity shell.

I'm not a huge fan of Unity, but I do think that the increasingly desktop-agnostic direction that Canonical is taking with Ubuntu is good for Ubuntu derivatives and the Linux client ecosystem in general.

There will be better shells in the future, and they will be less complicated to develop and distribute because Canonical cleaned up the interface between the shell and the underlying application platform(s).

OpenSUSE is a good KDE distro and a good supporter of KDE. The differences are that is is not regularly released in time with the KDE releases and it is more likely to replace gaps in KDE's offering with other software like Yast and Firefox. Many people will see this as advantages.

"Oh well, I guess it means I will be yet another user shifting from Canonical distributions over to Linux Mint. "

Linux Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. So using it in place of Ubuntu desktop can make sense if you prefer Gnome over Unity. But the existance of Linux Mint KDE depends on the existance of Ubuntu having good KDE packages (also called Kubuntu).